So you want to be a princess, do you? No? Oh right, sorry. All that twirling around the ballroom in a pair of glass slippers and kissing frogs on top of a perilous pile of pea-prod mattresses was just a musty old fantasy of my own, was it?
Maybe you didn’t spend great swathes of your childhood tottering around in your mother’s patent-leather high heels with the tablecloth wrapped around your skinny shoulders. Maybe you didn’t sit under a wigwam constructed of the sweeping brush, the mop and the yard brush, with a candlewick bedspread thrown over the shaky frame, eating jam sandwiches with the crusts cut off, holding your pinkie in the air and threatening to have Action Man beheaded for daring to turn up to your tea party in nothing more than his khaki bandana?
Maybe you were one of those biro-stained kids cutting worms in half with the pinking shears and trapping ants under a magnifying glass and making potions out of Mi-Wadi and crushed slugs. Maybe you never pretended your rosary beads were a string of abalone pearls, your mantilla a veil of antique lace.
But I bet you did. Even slug-crushers need to rule the paddling-pool waves sometime.
Anyway, regardless of how you spent your formative years, unless you’ve been vacationing in a diving bell off Franz Josef Land for the past few weeks, or you’ve recently been regurgitated whole from the bowels of a rubber shark, the news that Britain’s Prince Harry, lord of beard and beaded bracelet, is to marry the tooth-perfect, politically correct actor Meghan Markle, lover of the dispossessed and her rescue dogs, must by now have reached your shell-likes.
Maybe it’s an age thing (mine, not his), but I find Prince Harry marginally less odious than the rest of his royal tribe. And although I have an almost pathological inability to properly honour occasions (I spent my own hastily conceived wedding in a bar in Edinburgh with a couple of mates and a chest infection), I find myself wishing him well.
My girlhood enthusiasm for being a princess was pretty short-lived actually
I remember steadfastly avoiding watching the funeral of his mother, Princess Diana, on television in 1997, instead walking into town that September morning from our damp basement flat near Leeson Street with my one-year-old son in his buggy, to buy him his first pair of shoes. I remember being gobsmacked to find the majority of the shops on Grafton Street closed, presumably so that the staff could huddle around a bulky TV set for a ringside view of the People’s Princess being paraded down the Mall in her coffin, her young sons following stoically in her wake. The image of those stricken boys was of course unavoidable, the cruelty of public duty never quite so unforgettably illustrated.
Twenty years later and some of us (namely myself) may have sagged a little under the weight of the past two decades, and indeed may not be as intolerant towards collective grief or jollification as we used to be. And anyway, it’s Christmas, right? And who but the most curmudgeonly is going to resent that grief-stricken little boy in the starched collar and tie being granted a fairy-tale happy ending, despite his privilege and endless entitlements.
My girlhood enthusiasm for being a princess was pretty short-lived actually, the venture seeming about as viable as my teetering wigwam. It didn’t take much to realise that I just didn’t have princess-ability, no matter how many times I swooned into a balletic death pirouette after taking a bite out of a cooking apple.
I stared at things from behind a curtain of mousy brown hair until people told me to go away
First, pretty much all the princesses I encountered in my Ladybird books were blonde. This may seem like an insignificant hurdle in these peroxide days, but, lolling about on the scutch grass of a dry suburban back garden in 1968, the non-blonde problem seemed insurmountable.
Also, I was a glowerer, not a twinkler. Princesses twinkled and tripped around the place in tightened corsets, singing to the tulips and charming the bluebirds out of the trees. I, on the other hand, stared at things from behind a curtain of mousy brown hair until people told me to go away. And as for the bluebirds, the nuns warned me never to sing out loud in choir; I was just to mime, so as not to put the other children off. Fiddle-de-dee, eh?
Still, we all have our destinies. Turned out I was a slug-crusher after all, squeezing out the pulpy entrails one grisly gastropod mollusc at a time.